Humiliating the lost generation

Over at First Thoughts, Matthew Cantirino posted a link to a collection of letters written by jobless or underemployed Millenials, to the Atlantic. It’s searing to read the letters The Atlantic published. For his part, Matthew writes:

Thus far, the so-called Millennials (at least in the United States) have mostly kept their disappointment to themselves. But will their disenchantment ever surface publicly, as it has in parts of Europe? Might this early experience of hardship create a new crop of leaders or result in new definitions of success, away from the resume-oriented, double-working-parent model? Or is there a danger that this group of Americans will begin to resemble another ‘Lost Generation’?

If you’re older, your natural inclination may be to roll your eyes and sneer at these 20-somethings as pampered. I think this is quite wrong — just as wrong, actually, as disregarding the trauma to someone in their fifties or sixties who has been laid off, and who can’t find work, and just as wrong for reasons FT reader John Willems captures in his combox response. Excerpt:

I myself am a millenial (24), and indeed, I am worried about the job situation. I understand that my position is better than most and that people before have had it worse. Here, I think, would be my summary of the situation we are in. Growing up, everyone my age was told that education was the key to success. That was the one constant in the universe. Do well in school and you have a future. Go to college, graduate school if possible. The people who told us this were not sinister or lazy. They thought it was true because it worked pretty well for them. A college education was one of those certain investments that had little to no risk.

More:

Are we mad? Yes, we are mad basically because we made the “responsible choice.” The irresponsible choice was to do what some of my classmates did and party their way out of one semester of college. The irresponsible thing to do was to major in English and try your hand at writing novels rather than go to engineering school or law school, which leads directly to a career. We made the safe investment, and every adult we every met told us it was a safe investment. There are no downsides to going to college, except that there are. Now, in this recession, there are no jobs at all. The number of jobs created in August was zero, and the work force grows every day. We, on the other hand, still have this debt.

You might say: Welcome to the real world. Nothing is guaranteed. Suck it up. And there would be something to that. But I think it is not only uncompassionate — and not in a squishy-sentimental way — but it fails to understand the deep dimensions of this challenge — a challenge that older workers who have been downsized, and who face dismal employment prospects, also face. It’s a matter of once sense of justice, and even what you might call metaphysical order, being violated — and that’s a far more serious thing than being merely unemployed. Explanation after the jump:

I was once going through a hard time with a situation at work, and when I would go to confession, I would lay out to the priest how much I struggled with confusion and anger over what I considered the irrationality and injustice of the particular situation. His counsel amounted to, “What are you complaining about? You have a job, don’t you? Suck it up.” And he was right on a certain level; it really could always be worse. But he was also wrong. What I was struggling with most of all was a violation of my deep sense of order. To someone on the outside, this might look like the whining of the privileged, but it didn’t feel that way to me. I was really in turmoil over this, and didn’t know how I was going to come out the other side. Mind you, I have as part of my psychological make-up a deep need for Order, which made the irrationality and injustice of this particular situation especially hard to take. This, by the way, is why I was undone by the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, whereas Catholic friends who were every bit as outraged by it as I was were able to weather the storm just fine. When I commit to believing that the world is a certain way, and it turns out not to be, the gap between what I think and what actually is is a chasm I risk falling into. But that’s me. The point is, we don’t help people who are in this kind of crisis find ways to be resilient, and even hopeful, amid their confusion and suffering by simply telling them to suck it up. I had fallen into a cycle of despondence that was really toxic for me before things resolved themselves in my case — and I didn’t know how to get out of it.

I am disinclined to sneer at the crisis Millenials are going through, because however coddled they may have been by their parents and culture, and however much greater their advantages are than their co-generationalists in Zimbabwe or Tijuana, they are still thrown into a world they were not prepared for, and they need help and solidarity — as do older workers who foresaw a glide path to a stable retirement, and are now looking at spending their elderly years in deprivation and constant insecurity.

Anyway, all of us in this country, at least among the middle class, have been culturally conditioned by our postwar prosperity to believe in a certain order and rationality to our universe. We were told that if we worked hard, got good grades, and played by the rules, things would probably turn out well for us. This was a rational conclusion, based on common experience — until suddenly, it no longer was. Industrial workers dealt with it as their industries got outsourced (think of the lines from Billy Joel’s “Allentown”:Well we’re waiting here in Allentown/For the Pennsylvania we never found/For the promises our teachers gave/If we worked hard/If we behaved./So the graduations hang on the wall/But they never really helped us at all/No they never taught us what was real…). What I think is so poignant and admirable about John Willems’s response is this passage:

I can’t blame Baby Boomers for this predicament, though I can’t really blame myself either. Both thought based on good information that college was worth it. In the same situation, both would rationally do exactly what they did. What is eventually going to have to happen is that the bubble is going to have to burst the same way that it did with houses, and people will be hurt. I don’t know how it will turn out.
The worst part about this is not our standard of living, which will still by higher than most people. The worst part about this is the failed expectations. Conservatives often note the culture of narcissum my generation has been immersed in, such as giving a ribbon to everyone who participates. What may surprise them is that in the end my generation may end up hating itself. People always told us that we were really going to make something of ourselves. They told that to me. People actually started talking about when I was going to make my first million when I was in high school. However, if I graduate law school, cannot find a job, and I have to rely on my parents in my mid-20s, the worse part will not be the money I could have made, it will be the humiliating fact that I had so much and could make nothing of it. Those participant ribbons never really made anybody feel better about themselves, but they did raise expectations. Those expectations are now crashing down.

Note that he doesn’t blame anybody for having raised expectations so high, but he identifies the worst thing about this crisis: not poverty (relative or absolute), but the loss of dignity, the humiliation of the experience. Do not underestimate the political force inherent in that sense of humiliation. Some of the worst villains of history came to power by giving voice to the disgust ordinary people felt over their own humiliation. More than freedom, I think, people want dignity. They’ll be prepared, at least for a while, to live with a lack of freedom, and even of material prosperity, in exchange for a restoration of dignity (or at least the illusion of same). The difference between the way things are, and the way we have come to expect them to be, is a chasm that an entire nation and political culture can fall into.

Leaving politics aside, the humiliation of unemployment or underemployment is having serious social effects. I invite you to read Don Peck’s most recent piece in The Atlantic, in which he discusses at length the prospects for the middle class at this moment. Note this passage:

What I didn’t emphasize in that story is the extent to which these sorts of social problems—the kind that can trap families and communities in a cycle of disarray and disappointment—have been seeping into the nonprofessional middle class. In a national study of the American family released late last year, the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox wrote that among “Middle Americans”—people with a high-school diploma but not a college degree—an array of signals of family dysfunction have begun to blink red. “The family lives of today’s moderately educated Americans,” which in the 1970s closely resembled those of college graduates, now “increasingly resemble those of high-school dropouts, too often burdened by financial stress, partner conflict, single parenting, and troubled children.”

“The speed of change,” wrote Wilcox, “is astonishing.” By the late 1990s, 37 percent of moderately educated couples were divorcing or separating less than 10 years into their first marriage, roughly the same rate as among couples who didn’t finish high school and more than three times that of college graduates. By the 2000s, the percentage in “very happy” marriages—identical to that of college graduates in the 1970s—was also nearing that of high-school dropouts. Between 2006 and 2008, among moderately educated women, 44 percent of all births occurred outside marriage, not far off the rate (54 percent) among high-school dropouts; among college-educated women, that proportion was just 6 percent.

The same pattern—families of middle-class nonprofessionals now resembling those of high-school dropouts more than those of college graduates—emerges with norm after norm: the percentage of 14-year-old girls living with both their mother and father; the percentage of adolescents wanting to attend college “very much”; the percentage of adolescents who say they’d be embarrassed if they got (or got someone) pregnant; the percentage of never-married young adults using birth control all the time.

One stubborn stereotype in the United States is that religious roots are deepest in blue-collar communities and small towns, and, more generally, among Americans who do not have college degrees. That was true in the 1970s. Yet since then, attendance at religious services has plummeted among moderately educated Americans, and is now much more common among college grads. So, too, is participation in civic groups. High-school seniors from affluent households are more likely to volunteer, join groups, go to church, and have strong academic ambitions than seniors used to be, and are as trusting of other people as seniors a generation ago; their peers from less affluent households have become less engaged on each of those fronts. A cultural chasm—which did not exist 40 years ago and which was still relatively small 20 years ago—has developed between the traditional middle class and the top 30 percent of society.

The interplay of economic and cultural forces is complex, and changes in cultural norms cannot be ascribed exclusively to the economy. Wilcox has tried to statistically parse the causes of the changes he has documented, concluding that about a third of the class-based changes in marriage patterns, for instance, are directly attributable to wage stagnation, increased job insecurity, or bouts of unemployment; the rest he attributes to changes in civic and religious participation and broader changes in attitudes among the middle class.

In fact, all of these variables seem to reinforce each other. Nonetheless, some of the most significant cultural changes within the middle class have accelerated in the past decade, as the prospects of the nonprofessional middle class have dimmed. The number of couples who live together but are not married, for instance, has been rising briskly since the 1970s, but it really took off in the aughts—nearly doubling, from 3.8 million to 6.7 million, from 2000 to 2009. From 2009 to 2010, that number jumped by nearly a million more. In six out of 10 of the newly cohabitating couples, at least one person was not working, a much higher proportion than in the past.

Whatever the reason, the fact that so many young adults weren’t firmly rooted in the workforce even before the crash is deeply worrying. It means that a very large number of young adults entered the recession already vulnerable to all the ills that joblessness produces over time. It means that for a sizeable proportion of 20- and 30-somethings, the next few years will likely be toxic.

These young people have not been prepared — psychologically, emotionally, or spiritually — for the adverse world they now find themselves in. Few of us who grew up middle-class have. This economic crisis is going to have huge cultural and political costs that we are only beginning to imagine. Sooner or later, someone is going to come along who is going to be able to address the humiliating feeling of powerlessness that the unemployed and underemployed feel, and who is going to be able to articulate and direct their anger. This is going to be a very scary moment for America. I wish our political class understood what their jacking around with idiotic partisan games risks. As to my tribe, we do not have a serious conservative politics remotely adequate to these challenges. Or so it seems to me.

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26 Responses to Humiliating the lost generation

What I find so discouraging about the current state of affairs is the fact there is a virtually unlimited amount of much needed, meaningful work to be done in this country that goes undone because we can’t seem to stop looking backwards.

James Howard Kunstler has repeatedly pointed this out. As he says, we could put every able bodied person in the country back to work tomorrow doing jobs such as rebuilding the commuter rail system, or down scaling and localizing the agricultural system. This, however, is apparently unacceptable, as it might require us to get our hands dirty.

We seem incapable of imagining a future in which a job on Wall Street is not the ultimate measure of success.

People don’t want to hear this, and it doesn’t sometimes seem like beating a dead horse, but this loss of dignity started with contraceptive mentality that kicked off with the “sexual revolution”. That’s a marked turning point where people started thinking it was “liberating” to think of sex as just a recreational activity when it really just enabled people to give into their basest desires to treat others and be treated as objects for personal gratification.

So, now you have a generation of people raised by a generation of people who entered marriage with baggage from recreational dating and sex (if they entered into marriage at all) and more likely got divorced because the baggage was too big to unpack or their spouses didn’t make them “happy” enough. This Millennial generation was raised with unstable home lives (even for those whose parents stayed married the “baggage disputes” and specter of divorce left things a bit uncertain at times), not only permission but encouragement to engage in demoralizing dating behavior as the new norm, and nowhere to turn but academia for any sense of real worth.

But schools have been selling the same snake oil for close to fifty years: “you can be/do anything you want to do”, ” if you don’t do get good grades in school you will be a failure in life”, “a college education automatically equals a great job upon graduation”. The first lie doesn’t account for personality quirks, environmental obstacles, and random chance. The second lie is denied by a history of many of our most accomplished leaders, scientists, and innovators being privately tutored or school drop-outs (from Ben Franklin to Bill Gates, who dropped out of college). And the third lie probably hasn’t been true in who knows how long.

I believe and hope that my children’s generation will have it better. My generation of parents is still trying to shake off some of the emotional baggage we have built up due to the contraceptive mentality, but I see more parents, conservative and liberal, making an effort to keep their families together and provide a stable environment for their children with one parent at home instead of a revolving door of daycare workers. And I think the explosion of homeschooling reflects a growing group of people who have been burned by the snake oil and refuse to let the same thing happen to their kids.

I can promise you that companies won’t hire people with degrees for manual labor jobs because they think you’ll quit the moment something better turns up. It has very little to do with “not wanting to get our hands dirty” and everything to do with the HR guy thinking (rightly in most cases): “Hmmm. I don’t want to hire this guy because this is just a short-term gig. I want a long-term worker.”

I think it’s life’s job to humiliate us, several times, over the course of a long life. The question is: will you use these learning experiences to make you humble? to bring you down to earth? to recognize that you better get your butt in gear and endear yourself (and make yourself useful) to your fellow man / woman / child / grandchild/ neighbor / husband / wife, etc.?

Or will you sit around moping about the lost “American Dream”, while hatred, resentment and bitterness start invading ever fiber of your being? That’s where the scary aspect you speak of, Rod, begins.

It may seem that it boils down to character, but how is character formed? Just saying “Suck it up” is as lazy as saying “Do well in school. You’ll be fine.” Young people are going to need encouragement. We’ve got to invest–real time, real effort, real love, in strengthening their characters for what lies ahead.

This is just about perfect and the most insightful piece I have read on this subject. Some points:

“I wish our political class understood what their jacking around with idiotic partisan games risks” is putting it mildly. And the people who in the last 30 have been the recipients of the wealth transfer from the middle class to the upper 15… wish they understood what their jacking around risks. Peasants with pitchforks and torches is nothing.

“We do not have a serious conservative politics remotely adequate to these challenges” is putting it mildly… the discussions about ‘smaller government’ and choosing among the feckless leading GOP candidates for 2012 are as orthogonal and irrelevant as they could be. There is also no serious liberal politics adequate to these challenges. There is, I would posit, not even a vocabulary adequate to discussing them at this point.

Radical measures involving very serious changes involving energy, manufacturing, taxation, the role of the financial sector, political contributions and use of the public airwaves, even rhetorical ethics… the list of what is needed goes on. The insight and the will… almost nonexistent.

It isn’t that the physical dirty jobs are for the uneducated and illegals, it is that we have let the immigrants of all stripes flood this country. Legal and illegal, both, they have made the bottom fall out of wages. I don’t blame an American for not doing the physical dirty work when the wages are only fit for a 3rd world peon. This trend is starting to hit the middle class now. Vast sections of the economy are being sent offshore or are being filled by indentured servants brought in from India. Legal work, IT/software, medical image reading, engineering, all being take from Americans and given away to the lowest bidder.

You’re right, Robert. There is plenty of interesting and necessary work that needs to be done, but no inclination at present to do it.

The Millenials job prospects are currently hurting from decisions made 30 years ago by big government and big corporations to arbitrage wages and environmental impacts. Big Governments agreed to “free trade” arrangements enabling Big Corporations to export jobs overseas to take advantage of slave labor and lax environmental standards.

Take Apple, for example. Chinese manufacturer Foxconn, a division of Hon Hai Precision Industry, makes the iPad for Apple. Foxconn is the manufacturer that has been in the news recently for a rash of worker suicides. Between 300,000 and 450,000 workers are employed at the Longhua Science & Technology Park in Shenzhen, a walled complex nicknamed “iPod City.” It has 15 factories, worker dormitories and its own city infrastructure. Few Americans would consider working in these miserable conditions, so these jobs have been considered “jobs Americans won’t do” by politicians and corporate oligarchs.

We have traded our employment opportunities for cheaper Chinese doo-dads and gizmos. Perhaps the Millenials will change things, but since they are big consumers of this stuff I have my doubts.

There’s something of a lost financial generation for those of us in our 30’s and 40’s. Being prudent and investing our retirement savings in mutual funds and a diversified stock portfolio, building equity in our homes, and refraining from credit card debt – the responsible course of action – has left us treading water. Being upside down on our mortgage and the turbulent stock market means our nest eggs are growing much more slowly than advertised. I suspect a good many of us are at [net] 0% growth.

My high school teacher said on more than one occasion that revolutions actually start with the middle class (unlike the inaccurate portrayals of French Revolution beginning with peasant uprisings when in fact it began with the Third Estate’s Tennis Court Oath.) That’s where the rubber of the “consent of the governed” meets the road – the sizable population that have attained, individually, a small portion of wealth and power whose consent the government must have to exist (unless it rules via force/terror).

I have Millenial kids, and am also old enough to remember the Bad Old Days of the 1970s Arab oil embargo and subsequent recession in the mid-70s. I have to ration my “Back in the Pleistocene, when we all rode on dinosaurs, when I was young …” remarks when speaking with our children, but here the audience is probably a bit more welcoming. So, back in the Pleistocene …

If you got a liberal arts degree in 1974, say, you had *no* expectations of getting a “corporate” job. None. Zip. Nada. Further, you probably didn’t *want* one. Never mind that a whole lot of my classmates eventually did go to MBA school, or switched to engineering, or became nurses or physicians’ assistants. (In other words, “sold out.”) In the mid-70s, there simply was no expectation of wealth. You didn’t eat rice and beans because you were a foodie; you ate them because you couldn’t afford anything else. You didn’t go to thrift stores because it was fashionable; you went because you were poor.

But what made it possible to survive was that the jobs now done by illegal immigrants – sporadic agricultural work; house cleaning; roofing; house painting; lawn services – was done by liberal arts graduates. There were many artists who hung drywall by day and painted by night; many writers who worked as nannies or short-order cooks.

That world is gone.

Personally, I think my generation’s sojourn in the world of humble, low-paid work was very good for us, even if it did motivate some to “sell out” and go corporate. The great loss for today’s Millenials is that such work isn’t open to them anymore.

One thing that I admire about Europe is that they really do seem to judge self-worth a lot less on one’s job.

It just feels like such a dominating factor in the US. The first thing you do when you meet someone is talk about your profession. That’s in some ways really good. I think immigrants feel more accepted in the US because if your working, your accepted.

Barbara C, raises an argument that is fairly common among many conservatives, which can be broadly stated as blaming society’s ills on the abandonment of conservative social norms.

I’m not particularly interested in rehashing old arguments over the merits of the social changes over the last century or so. But what is interesting to consider is why conservative social values have gone out the window precisely at this particular moment in time.

Like many, I had assumed that these mostly had to do with economic factors. Greater prosperity has allowed more people to live outside of social norms without serious consequences. Barbara C. echoes that sentiment with her comment.

Which makes reading this article all the more interesting. What if it’s not economic factors that are to blame but rather population growth and density? Certainly, when considering how the fact of homosexuality figures into an evolutionary model, I have considered the possibility that it may partly be explained as an evolutionary feature that kicks in under circumstances of overcrowding. Perhaps the effects of high population density have broader social effects that we haven’t yet considered.

I have always considered myself Gen Y/Millennial (I was born 3 days before 1981, which is the usual formal definition) and I empathize with the pain that Rod is talking about here.

I’m a leader at my local church and about 30% of the post-college Millennial kids are unemployed. I want everyone to put themselves in these kids shoes:

At 17 years old, they are convinced by the older generation that, even though they don’t know what they want to do with their lives, college is the answer. Sure, it’s expensive, but that’s what college loans are for. After all, when they graduate they will easily be able to pay those loans down.

Four years of school and $50,000 worth of debt later they get out only to discover that there are very few jobs available for them. This lack of jobs runs the gamut… few jobs in education, few jobs in engineering, few jobs in construction, few jobs in marketing, few jobs in anything.

Now, for people like Robert, think about this: First of all, are these kids willing to get their hands dirty? More of them than you think.

But lets do the math.

Let’s say a job landscaping pays $24K per year. (HA! As if.) Take out state and federal taxes, rent ($600 per month for a crappy apartment), food (let’s say $150 per month), a tithe and $350 per month for incidentals (which will include electricity, gas, insurance… we all know that’s not enough). Now take $575 per month student loan payments. At the end of the year, he will have saved up… nothing. He’ll be $300 more in debt than he was before.

Let’s tally up the score. The older generation told him to go to college (when the job he’s doing now doesn’t exactly require a degree). The older generation told him to get student loans to pay for it. And now the older generation is telling him to “get his hands dirty” so he can get a job that won’t even cover basic expenses and that he’s a lazy good for nothing if he doesn’t.

The amount of self control I’ve exhibiting in *not* flying into a rage right here in the comments section is nothing short of heroic.

I have friends with college degrees working as electricians, plumbers, begging for unstable jobs working construction, working low-wage jobs for state social agency while the older generation is double-dipping into retirement (which means the agency is paying them so much that they can’t afford to hire another cheap Millennial). Most of these people would have STARTED with their careers 4 years earlier and with no debt, but the teachers, the guidance counselors, the parents and the general rule of society was that you weren’t anything unless you went to college.

What can we do about this? I don’t know.

But you can start with even the tiniest inkling of Christian empathy. I hear flippant “get your hands dirty” or “kids today are just lazy or entitled” or “[whatever ‘well duh’ hindsight nonsense you want to insert here]” and the best comparison I can make is how the older generation in the church has responded to divorces. It’s all our fault, if we were more like you we wouldn’t be in this pickle, kids today, uphill both ways in the snow.

This is a great failure of the older generation… and especially the church. Listening to the older generation helped get us into this problem and now that the ladder they climbed up has been kicked out while we were on it, it is our fault for falling down. Perhaps platitudes will soothe your conscience, but they are unfeeling and un-Christian and you should be ashamed of yourselves.

This turned into more of a rant than I wanted it to be and I’m sure it will be ignored or swept away by the very people who need to hear it most. But the truth is we feel like we have been lied to. We’re doing our best but every word on how we are lazy or selfish or entitled is a kick in the side while we’re already down.

John Willems said: “Growing up, everyone my age was told that education was the key to success. That was the one constant in the universe. Do well in school and you have a future.”

One possible flaw in Willems’ argument is his assumption that the education he received was of high quality and thus there must be other reasons for his difficulty in finding a job. In my view, nothing could be further from the truth. From the continuing millions of functional illiterates churned out by our K-12 schools, to the grade-inflated post-modernist dreck taught at Harvard, the progressive domination of the education industry continues to wreak havoc. It’s no wonder there aren’t a lot of employers eager to hire a lot of these kids.

Parents wishing for a liberal education for their child have a long, tough road ahead of them.

Jeff S.: Say what you will about Willems, but he plainly is not a “functional illiterate.” And even if what you said about Harvard were true, it’s no different from what Buckley was complaining about 50-odd years ago, and we didn’t have these employment problems back then.

I find it laughable that the principle reason that people of my generation have a hard time finding work is because the education system somehow failed them. I am one of the least educated people I know; I dropped out of high school after my sophmore year, and starting working a union job loading boxes for UPS. Over the years I made several poor decisions involving sex and drugs, but none were “off the rails” bad. Cut ahead 6 from my 21 year old mess of a life and I’m happily married (to another high school drop out), a home owner, and enjoying life in general. The reason I attribute a lot of this too is the opportunity to use my inherent love of computers to land a job in 2006 with a company that was willing to give me a shot. 2007, my job would not even be on the table at the company due to budget constraints. I provided value, irreplaceable value at a cost where I make about 10-15k less than I should.

There is no one willing to take risks on human capital out there. There is no reason to take a risk with the amount of people looking or a job. The near perfect employee is one with a track record, currently employed, not close to retirement or demanding of high level late career wages. Someone who is in their early 30s, looking for change, willing to forgo wages for possible advancement in the near future.

Among my closest friends, all of which are 26-27 year olds, their education or quality of it has not been the biggest factor in their employment other than pure credentialism. Santa Clara University, UCLA, Cal Berkeley, UCSB, Furd, all employed. They also, unremarkably all found jobs in 2004-2005.

I believe the problem of finding a job now is not at all about quality but merely of quantity of available jobs out there. Imagine the job market as a bath tub where retirement is a drain and the faucet is new younger people entering the work force. Baby Boomers nearing the point where they are circling the drain and they have…well…they had their expectations of retirement dashed and they are still 15-20 years away from it, based on personal goals. It seems absurd that back in 99-00 and even 2004-2005 that early retirement was in the cards for boomers. It’s sort of analogous to the housing bubble where we can only start seeing meaningful price appreciation when inventory has cleared.

As a millenial, I think I’ll probably die before I retire. While that may seem like a country song wet-dream, it’s fundamentally changed the way I’ve looked at my job and career. Gotta take life one day at a time I suppose.

My son is a millennial. He and his friends are unexpectedly mature and balanced at a young age. They are concerned about the world and want to contribute to solutions. They follow the rules and don’t get particularly angry when they don’t get hired.

They have the makings of a great generation if our leaders don’t squander them.

Bringing out the canards of public schools, laziness and contraception (really? the pill causes unemployment?) shows the shallowness of faux-conservative thinking.

elizabeth, it’s one of the hardest things about being moderate to conservative; If I blame the state of the world on things I and people I love take for granted like contraception, there wouldn’t be much good in the world to hold on to and work towards.

Patrick, my whole point is that homeschooling parents are preparing their kids for college but they aren’t assuming their kids will go to college. If their kids loves carpentry, they encourage them to enter that trade. A lot of homeschoolers are becoming entrepreneurs as well.

Geoff G., a lot of people in my generation were raised on all of the nonsense I mentioned above and then when we graduated college, married, and started having kids it failed us miserably. As a result, I know many families both politically liberal and conservative, atheist and conservative Christian, who embrace the conservative value of keeping young children at home with a parent even if they have to work opposite shifts to do it.

Elizabeth, the pill does not cause unemployment but it has and does degrade male/female relationships leading to the loss of dignity. One of the main points of this post is not unemployment rates, but how it is mentally and emotionally effecting the Millennials and how it correlates to a loss of dignity.

Marc and TTT: Clearly Willems is not illiterate, and is probably quite capable of being a productive citizen, along with many other graduates of our public schools and universities. But I didn’t mean to impugn his literacy–rather, I was addressing Willems own citing of the claim we all heard that “education is the key to success.” While he is right in noting the ubiquitousness of the claim, I still think that, taken as whole for all kids, the education we receive these days doesn’t justify the reputation we blindly assign to it.

This is a really great essay. I have a son, 15, who’s due for college in a couple of years. He is an A student, and we’re gearing up for college boards and the like. And now I’m wondering, is it worth it? What is the alternative?

Rod it’s great to see you blogging again. And I’m so happy to hear that Ruth is doing well!